I have been experimenting with siphons, which seem a natural fit for Ironfleet’s grand tradition of aggressive salvage.

Unfortunately, although I was clear on the fact that unattended POS guns would not shoot at my siphon, I didn’t give adequate consideration to the likelihood that they would kaboomski the ship I sent back to see if anything had been siphoned. Whoops, I guess I didn’t need that ship anyway. :( However it was a bummer to lose the 17mil worth of polymers that was in my cargo after I liberated it from somebody else’s siphon. [Waves at -BAD.]

Truth is, I never spent much time in range of POS guns before, although Jim visited those vicinities often, in heavy-iron 0.0 fleets with repping available. I had it in my head from the experiences of many long years ago that small ships didn’t face much risk from POS guns — a fact which I can now manifestly report is untrue. My fragile covops died instantly, the tanked and stabbed Maller I sent for the wreck couldn’t get out fast enough either.

So, help an old man out, would you? What’s a good ship and fit and strategy for emptying a siphon under POS guns? Or is there no way to do it except for looting the siphon with perfect timing and being in and out before the guns find the range?

All suggestions and advice gratefully received.

Update: I went back in a Velator, based on some bad web advice that POS guns take “forever” to lock small targets. My velator lasted 7 measured seconds on grid.

I did more research, found this:

Different POS modules have different lock speeds. A small gun locks pretty fast (given their 250mm scan res it would take ~8s to lock a frig), where medium guns (75mm SR, ~30s) and large guns (35mm SR, ~55s) lock very slow. Additionally, Warp Scrambler, Disruptor, and web batters have even lower scan res (30mm SR, taking a long time to lock even a battlecruiser (~30s).

This time I took notice of what killed me: Small faction guns. I think maybe some special effort went into making this particular tower hostile to siphoners.

This entry was posted
on Sunday, September 21st, 2014 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Salvage Notes, Today In Ironfleet.
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